Pablo Picasso – At the Lapin Agile

I am not a big fan of Picasso’s art or persona, but recently I discovered some of the paintings from his early period which I quite liked. The air of fin de siecle is still present in these early paintings and one can observe the influence of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Pablo Picasso, At the Lapin Agile, 1905

Painting “At the Lapin Agile” shows an interior of the cabaret club called “Lapin Agile” in Montmarte. A drunken, brooding harlequin clad in earthy tones in the foreground, a humble-looking guitarist in brown in the background; the two figures show the artist and the owner of the club, Frédéric Gérard. The harlequin, a motif borrowed from the eighteenth century masters such as Antoine Watteau and Goya, has lost his cheerfulness and vibrancy over the centuries. Frédéric’s guitar instantly brings to mind the wistful sounds of Francesco Tarrega’s guitar. Between two men we see a female figure that could have been transported from some seedy cabaret scene painted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec just a decade earlier. The woman is Germaine Pichot. Just four years earlier she had been pursued relentlessly by Picasso’s best friend Carles Casagemas, a mad and passionate Catalan poet and painter who shot himself in front of Germaine in February 1901. Casagemas’ death kickstarted Picasso’s blue period, filled with sorrowful figures and dominated by the shades of blue. After exhausting his feelings of saddness and loss Picasso’s palettes drifted in landscapes painted in warm tones of pink, orange, red and brown; this was his Rose Period. The white pallor of the woman’s skin contrasts with her blood-red lips. Her face seen in profile is traced in a thick black line. She is looking in the distance. All three characters in the club are physically close to one another but distant in spirit. Everyone is lost in their own thoughts, everyone is thinking about their own problems. Visually the scene brings to mind Toulouse-Lautrec’s cabaret scenes, but the mood of the painting embodies Vincent van Gogh’s saying that a café is a place where one can ruin oneself or commit a crime. The colour palette of earthy, heavy, murky shades of brown and red contributes to the mood. The harlequin looks quite miserable and perhaps even misanthropic. Even though Picasso was devastated after the loss of his friend, it still didn’t stop him from pursuing romance with Germaine and yet, in the painting, she looks like a stranger to him. The harlequin’s face is turned away from both the woman and the guitarist, and instead he chose to reveal his face expression to us, allowing us to read it as if it were a book of emotions. Picasso was commissioned to paint this painting by the owner of the club, in exchange for food, and it is interesting that he chose to place himself in the foreground of the painting. Typical Picasso, wanting to be in the centre of everything.

Pablo Picasso – Oh, Those Guitars!

‘Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.‘ (Pablo Picasso)*

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Guitar, 1921

I’m not a particular fan of Picasso, but earlier this month I found myself absolutely besotted by his collages and guitars. Oh, those guitars! I was so inspired by them that I started making collages myself, with guitars and cut-out pieces of newspapers. Despite their seeming simplicity, I feel a strong creative energy from them and that’s why I like them.

Picasso’s art can be clearly divided into periods, some by colours he used, others by the specific motifs and themes he painted repeatedly: in his melancholic ‘blue phase’ he was interested in beggars, the homeless, prostitutes, drunk people, in his ‘rose period’ it was all about joy, carnivals and harlequins. Then, inspired by Cezanne’s theory that everything in nature and world around us can be divided into geometric objects, Picasso, along with Braque, delved into Analytical Cubism which resulted in rather confusing, dark and distorted paintings. Their alteration of reality is almost psychedelic, which is kind of cool. What followed is known as Synthetic Cubism or Crystal Cubism which followed the idea that a painter’s job is not to ‘copy’ world around him, but to ‘construct’, and so they did, discovering at the same time the power of collage as a technique. Instead of breaking an object into its essential pieces, they built objects using contrasting colours, pieces of newspapers, fragments of their own sketches. Picasso’s painting Guitar, Sheet Music, Glass made in autumn of 1912, is usually considered the first example of Synthetic Cubism. It’s so simple yet so striking. The background is actually a wallpaper, and then there’s a piece of blue paper, and a piece of black paper, all very simple, and then, out of nowhere, a piece of sheet music and a charcoal drawing of a glass made in the style of the previous Analitical Cubism. The most interesting of all, a cut out piece of newspaper with half a title showing ‘Le Jou’, shortened from ‘Le Journal’  meaning ‘Newspapers’. Picasso is playing a word game with us here, ‘le jou’ means ‘game’. Below that it says ‘Le Bataille s’est engage’ which means ‘The battle has begun’ alluding to the raging wars on Balkan, when Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro fought for the independence from the Ottoman Empire. However, this is usually interpreted not just as Picasso’s awareness of the political situation of Europe, but is seen as symbolic for the battle of Cubism and collage as new styles and methods in art.

I hate it when people say something like: ‘Oh, everyone could do that, what’s so revolutionary about it?’ My art teacher in grammar school had a good answer to these ignorant remarks, she said: ‘ Well, yes, everyone could cut out a piece of newspaper and glue it on paper, but the fact that no one did it before, that no artist dared to do it before, that’s what makes it avant-garde and revolutionary!’ This can well be applied to many more artists, like Matisse, Miro, Malevich, Mondrian, Rothko, even Pollock.

Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, Glass, Paris, autumn, 1912. Papers and newsprint (Le Journal, 18 November 1912) pasted, gouache and charcoal on paper

Pablo Picasso, Musicians with masks, 1921

Pablo Picasso, The Guitar, 1916, Synthetic Cubism

Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Guitar (Mandoline et guitare), 1924

Artworks I’ve Discovered This Morning

I won’t even try to express my excitement, joy and rapture because of the massive amount of artists and artworks I’ve stumbled upon this morning on Pinterest. But I did have a need to share all these beautiful paintings with you. I’m sure you’ll like some of them because the variety is incredible; different styles, colours, nations, time periods, and yet I like them all. I’m overwhelmed. One more painting and my mind would explode.

Night scenes, explosion of colours, spring meadows, roosters, Ohara Koson’s beautiful nature scenes, wild and surrealist street scenes, some Welsh artists, a peacock, Belgrade after the rain, romantic flowers and picturesque seaside towns, Spanish beauties, 18th century Asian lady awaiting her lover in the forest, Polynesian sky and sea, Montmartre stairs, purples and yellows; if your taste inclines towards some of these things, you’ll enjoy these eye-candies as much as I have.

P.S. Gustav Klimt was born on this day in 1862. He is always in my thoughts…

1938-45. Dancer and Reclining Man Emil Nolde

Paris Montmartre – pastel by Yuriy Shevchuk

Polynesia, The Sea ~ Henri Matisse

Polynesia, The Sky ~ Henri Matisse

Rainy day in Belgrade by Dusan Djukaric

Dusan Djukaric. After the Rain

Dusan Djukaric – Belgrade tram

1889. Childe Hassam – Mrs. Hassam and Her Sister

1890s Childe Hassam~ such beautiful light & movement…

Tetsuo Aoki

Dan McCaw

1907. Kees Van Dongen – Houses in Amsterdam

1905. Joan Brull ‘Dream’

Kinuko Y. Craft – Galadriel

Egon Schiele

1893. By the Window – Konstantin Korovin (Russian, 1861-1939) Impressionism

1915. Sergiev Posad – Konstantin Gorbatov

1945-46. Vanessa Bell(1879-1961), lady with a book

1873. John Atkinson Grimshaw, Moonlit Lane

1893. Edvard Munch – Girl Looking out the Window

1898. Henri Matisse (1869-1954)Woman Reading in a Violet Dress

1860. Edgar Degas Le Fauteuil [The armchair], Pencil and watercolour on paper

1775-80. Utka Nayika – A lady awaits her lover in the forest

1922. Hermen Anglada Camarasa (Spanish, 1872-1959) – Portrait of Jennifer Bosch, Duchess of Durcal

1914. Granada – Hermen Anglada Camarasa. Spanish (1871 – 1959)

Joan Miro

1925. Joan Miró – This is the Colour of My Dreams

1902. The Happy Quartet – Henri Rousseau

1919. Henri Matisse, Interior at Nice

1914. Subway riders, New York City, Francis Luis Mora. American Painter, born in Uruguay (1874 – 1940)

The Black Sea at night – Ivan Aivazovsky

Painting by Vladimir Dunjic Serbian Artist

Ohara Koson (1877-1945), Japan

Ohara Koson, Grasshoper and Fool Moon, c.1910

Ohara Koson – Moon and Blue flowers, Japan

Paintings by French Naive Artist Cellia Saubry

Peacock, 17th century. Edo period (1615–1868). Japan. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Chris Neale, Pembrokeshire Artist

Sir John ‘Kyffin’ Williams, May 1918 – 1 September 2006) was a Welsh landscape painter who lived at Pwllfanogl, Llanfairpwll on the Island of Anglesey.

Autumn Treehouses ~ Becca Stadtlander

Gary Bunt, The Sleeping Gardener

Miguel Freitas

Valériane Leblond, Llanrhystyd, Wales

Lucy Grossmith

Kubo Shunman (Edo Period) ( Antique Japan Butterfly Illustration )

Carlos Nadal (Spanish, 1917-1998)

Higuchi Yuko

1938. A rooster – Pablo Picasso

1938. Picasso – Rooster